The bad news is that, short of a zombie apocalypse changing the planet’s demographics in ways we can’t even imagine, your country will never have a 25% bike modal share, or rates above 60% in city centres, as the Netherlands does. Our countries were already quite different (ours having hills) but really parted ways in the wake of the war...

Like a lot of countries in Europe, the Dutch were left broke. So while we were pouring the boom-time surplus into freestanding houses outside of our cities, they were patching holes in city centres.

Suburban development was further resisted in the Netherlands due to their unique shortage of farmland. So where the Sydney region, for example, has housing on land without any rail service (all the land coloured black on the following map)…

Empirical studies spanning decades show that minimally guided instruction (when the learners are novices) requires a large cognitive load and, therefore, is not supported by the research on how we learn effectively and efficiently. Solving a problem, specifically “problem-based searching” places a large burden on our working memory, especially by splitting learners’ attention, and therefore takes up valuable resources that are needed for actually learning. It’s possible to search and work on a problem for quite some time without learning a thing. It seems that only those who have extensive experience, schema, and prior knowledge benefit from this type of activity.

On Tuesday 4th April Channel 4 News in the UK carried a report on the impact of pollution from diesel cars upon UK mortality. It was claimed that pollution from diesel cars accounted for 40,000 excess deaths in the UK each year: 29,000 down to particulate matter (PM2.5) and 11,000 down to nitrogen oxides (NOx). The source of the statistics was a report from the Royal College of Physicians called Every breath we take: the lifelong impact of air pollution published in 2016. I decided to delve into the statistics and conclude that PM2.5 pollution from diesel cars may reduce life expectancy by between 2 and 22 days. Fake science and fake news is getting us into deep trouble...
The following story covered air pollution in UK cities, in particular NOx (nitrogen oxides) and soot emissions from the engines of diesel cars, that was reported to be prematurely killing 40,000 UK citizens per year!

Scotland has become a serial electricity importer as was to be expected. In Jan-Feb imports were 2,733 MWh. This has risen to 227,002 MWh in Oct-Nov (to date), an increase by a factor of 83.
Imports of 1000 MW or more are commonplace peaking at 2552 MW on 23 November following the reactor trip at Torness.
Oct-Nov was less windy than Jan-Feb, which was particularly stormy and wind never got close to the presumed 3500 MW curtailment level (dashed line lower panel). However, exports seem to be curtailed at a lower level of 2600 MW. This is difficult to explain other than wind did not get above this level.
Exports and wind output are still correlated but with one notable exception. From 11 to 17 Nov there was a block of exports not correlated with windy conditions. We can speculate that it was windy in Scotland but not in England at this time.
The reactor trip at Torness was followed by a sudden fall in wind, which just goes to show how events can conspire against grid integrity.

the majority of his constituents, a growing number of whom are homeless and unable even to get a council home to rent because of the Thatcherite housing policies of the past 35 years.

Barwell has described the homelessness crisis as “a moral shame on us”. But he has yet to show any willingness to address the fundamental issue: the need to build many more homes, and that these homes should be available to be lived in by people who are not fortunate through accidents of birth to be heirs to small fortunes.

First, the good news: another academic study using conventional cost-benefit analysis finds that motorists in the 27 EU countries have a net economic cost to society, with the UK second only to Germany in costs. Take a look at the nice short summary in the Guardian. It’s good to counteract what the Guardian correctly calls “The perennial complaint from drivers that they are excessively taxed”, not least the prejudice that cyclists are cheating by “not paying a tax”. The figure given for these external costs – £48 billion per annum, some £10 billion more than the total of motoring taxation revenue – looks pretty damning. However, it can be argued that the costs of motoring to society are considerably greater than those in the picture painted in the study, and that the report is inadequately critical of the status quo.

We should be listening to the people who we want to see cycling in the (near) future i.e. the 97%, and make them the subject of our city cycling research – through their eyes can we see the “real” world. Due to circumstances beyond their control, the current cyclist had to turn a blind eye. The current cyclist is desensitised – not by making a conscious decision.

As a scientific idea is one that is refutable, and as refutation may arrive from any quarter, I’d argue that deliberately limiting potential critique is by definition unscientific, so paywalled articles are not science. Most serious practitioners accept this, hence ArXiV, BioMedCentral etc etc.

The drag is in what the French call les sciences humaines; no less a personage than Martin Eve, for example, argues that “The best form of critique is immanent critique; making people aware of the boundaries that structure and limit their thought and practice from within.”

I read this statement, perhaps unfairly, as “Only club members’ comments are valuable.” But there are numerous examples–from crowdsourcing in astronomy to patient power in medical science–where this attitude is patently false, and damaging to the practice of science itself.

Google has always had “the ability to use editorial judgment to modify search results.” We humble users would wish it so: the price of decent search results is eternal vigilance against SEO, content farms, spammers, etc etc, not to mention paywall publishers who want to show up in search, but then don’t want to abide by the convention of the web that the content then be freely downloadable;(So-called “cloaking”).

I don’t know if you remember the days of AskJeeves, OpenDirectory, and AltaVista, Kent, often bizarrely irrelevant results, with spammy paid links indistinguishably mixed in–I seem to remember Coors bought the word ‘beer’ on one search engine–and all that after a wait over dialup.

The appearance of Google beta search in 1999 quite literally transformed the utility of the web. And if another search engine comes along that serves our needs better, we are but one click away from changing our allegiance, and Google knows it. I for one would love to use a search engine that strongly deprecated in its search rankins any publisher not in conformance with an ideal web: presenting open access, freely and fully downloadable, archivable content, alongside a responsive and honest commenting system. Life is short, I have no shortage of materials to read, and I’d rather favour those that play nicely with my attention. I certainly don’t want my search results spammed with paywalled stuff I can’t afford and won’t be buying. Keep it for your hundreds of subscribers!

So I agree with Mike: if you find your old business model isn’t working on the web, remove your content: the rest of us will just have to get by on the few crumbs that are left.

It gives me particular joy to write for the web, as I continue on my path the enlightenment. It is a suitably humble activity: obscurity is almost inevitable. Yet there is always the possibility that something I write will also help someone else. I always tell the truth as I see it. Where I cannot, I find the inner revelation about my own cultural beliefs even more rewarding (and disturbing) than seeing my truths writ large. That is why I currently write under a pseudonym after ten years of online presence under my true name: to explore the difference between the two states. Maybe one day I will write the comments I couldn't publish, but I probably won't, because they remain unwritten.

According to the Žižek bibliography on wikipedia, he has published 55 books since 2000. 55 books in less than 15 years. I was curious about whether this amounts to the sheer weight of writing that it would superficially appear to be. In assessing this I’ve excluded papers, letters, interviews, collections of his writing, things that are co-written, his joke book (!), edited collections and what is apparently a reprint of his doctoral thesis...Even so, he still writes a hell of a lot with a remarkable consistency. In spite of his self-presentation as dishevelled and chaotic, it seems rather unlikely that he’s a binge writer and that he instead has a very regular writing routine. The more I’ve thought about this, I’ve become really intrigued by the conditions of his working life and how they facilitate his prolific output. As part of the project me and Filip Vostal are discussing at the moment, looking at the acceleration of higher education and it’s implications for scholarship, I’m increasingly aware that I’d like to do a case study of Žižek as representing a mode of public intellectualism facilitated by the accelerated academy.

Like any aggressive raptor species, cyclists colonise the surrounding space. Unlike cars or scooters (which are also allowed to use the cycle lanes), they bring pedestrians a whispering death whose advent is heralded only by the shriek of their back-pedalling brakes. One night in Rotterdam I was nearly chopped in two, vertically, by a speeding, lightless roadster; he seemed to think it was my fault. It’s a mentality thing. The Dutch media harp on constantly about cyclists’ rights, as though they’re downtrodden rather than top dogs.

It’s actually quite stressful to cycle in Amsterdam, due to all the bikes. We’re not really used to sharing our cycle paths with anything other than the odd dog walker and maybe another cyclist coming the other way.

Few translation industry players really felt seriously threatened by Google, which was seen as a sort of free “toy” which could safely be ignored. Needless to say, it pretty much wiped out the professional “gisting” market that had previously been at the low-value end of many professional translators’ range of services.

I would venture to suggest that few of the top localization companies—those who service the top end of this complex market—are concerned at any potential threat from Google. Nevertheless, in 2013, Google launched a new fee-based localization service targeted at developers producing apps for mobile devices

Jargon phrase. ‘Permeability’ refers to the ability of traffic to get to places in a city (nice image, I suppose, of a city taking up people like blotting paper). ‘Filtered’ is the idea that we should select those who are allowed to so permeate.

"Good stuff! The term permeability in the context of cycle planning was purloined quite consciously from capilliary physiology; we were seeking a general term for a principle of always giving cyclists a legitimate exemption from one-way road schemes in Hackney: cycle contraflow lanes and modal filters, all that.
Of course, cyclists being what they are, they will often exact the permeability they require, be it legitimate or not. I believe the American term for this is ‘salmoning.’ Conscious acts of civil resistance to motor hegemony may be known as ‘CycleVoodoo.’ http://web.archive.org/web/20081121083617/http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/index.php/CycleVoodoo"

The answer is simple: time. It’s the only resource we can’t make more of, and it is the one that limits what we can possibly consume. Being able to find work that has been vetted, rather than having to vet it all yourself, is hugely valuable. You can now trust that the work has at least a minimum quality level, and is not just a video of somebody’s sleeping cat.

JB wrote: "This is a useful discussion, and I think Kosara is to be congratulated on posing what might be called the attentional argument for peer review so clearly, even if it does turn out to be ultimately false. My own view is that scholarly information seeking habits have been so radically changed over the past 20 years that is hard to be confident that any element of the print-based system will necessarily be valuable in the age of ready access to networked computers, but, you know, old habits die hard.
We also know, as randomwalk nicely illustrates, that traditional peer review is not good at identifying truly radical scientific breakthroughs. We know that it is hardly effective at detecting scientific malfeasance. We know it consumes a tremendous amount of reviewer time, and most of the time the reports they produce are simply buried–a tremendous waste. We know that ‘glamour journals’ sustain their 90%+ rejection rates as much as on a ‘sexiness’ criterion as on any of scientific rectitude. We know that junior colleagues fear the career consequences of criticising their seniors. We know their seniors, on occasion, abuse peer review by nicking ideas from unpublished manuscripts.
And as the function that Kosara claims for it here, of correctly apportioning scientific attention, is among the easiest to imagine replacing with modern tools such as overlay journals and microblogging platforms like Twitter, I suspect it is misguided of him to defend the status quo on these grounds."

When I first got the contract and told people, the first thing everyone asked was "How will you translate the first sentence?" It was a real challenge because most translators used "Mother", which I found did not get across the close relationship that "maman" implies in French. One translator left the word in French, which didn't really tell the reader anything about the connotation. I chose "My mother" because I thought about how someone would tell another person that his mother had died. Meursault is speaking to the reader directly. "My mother died today" seemed to me the way it would work, and also implied the closeness of "maman" you get in the French. Afterwards, I used "mama", partly because it sounds like "maman" and partly because I was aware that a British audience would probably prefer "Mum" and an American reader "Mom" so I needed something that worked on both sides of the Atlantic.

Somewhat hysterical attack on a campaign for a more courteous road environment prompts me to reply: "A collision from the rear is the least likely form of cycle-motor crash: even the doziest driver usually manages to look forwards, and even if they hate cyclists, they don’t want the paperwork that would follow a crash. Zoe Williams’ recent line that she feels “as safe as a bollard” when she rides seems like quite a nice truth.

Our own view is that open access publishing where the author pays is likely to be highly divisive, will undermine yet further academic freedom in some quarters, and will have unintended consequences of suppressing some work rather than rendering it increasingly available.

We are compliant with green open-access conventions and we see no reason to depart from that.

how to determine what can be posted and what cannot? The answer is to formalize some of the policies that are now in place at many major universities, policies that I call “provostial publishing.” Unlike traditional publishing, where editors review each paper for publication, provostial publishing is a means to determine which authors can post to the repository.

I define my usage of the internet into two epochs: before and after Google, so I am a fan.

BUT: when I search Google I expect to find content that is freely and fully downloadable as is the norm on the web.

Increasingly I have found the top links on some searches are unsatisfactory because they require subscription or registration, neither of which I desire.

If I do subscribe to online content, it will be because I decide a resource is valuable to me on a long term basis, and not because I lighted there once after a Google search.

I do NOT want pay-for content in my top search results on a routine Google search. I want, for philosophical and political reasons, to find only content that is world-readable, because that is the only content I want to cite. To put it another way, I want to be as ignorant as everyone else.

If too much pay-for content arrives in the top-ranked links following a Google search (and this seems to happening increasingly) I will use one of the many other search engines available.

I think you know this, and it keeps you straight, but I am concerned fiduciary pressures will corrupt you one day, and I assure you I follow the issue closely.